In many areas, the use of mobile terminals of wireless telecommunication systems by one person is regarded as a disturbance to other people. Such environments include libraries, restaurants and work environments. In other situations, use of mobile terminals may be dangerous, for example, by interfering with an individual's safe operation of an automobile.
Different solutions have been proposed to avoid disturbance by a mobile terminal. Examples are 1) call rejection based on Caller ID (U.S. Pat. No. 6,253,075 to Beghtol), 2) Delayed Call Answering (U.S. Pat. No. 6,246,889 to Boltz), and 3) alerting the portable communication device of an incoming call by an external device (U.S. Pat. No. 6,119,022 to Osborn).
Disturbance problems have partly been resolved by the above solutions. However, under these solutions, some emergency calls may be rejected if call rejection is used on a number believed to be unimportant by the called party. On the other hand, if delayed call answering (Boltz et al) or an external incoming call alert (Osborn et al) are utilized, non-urgent phone calls have the possibility of disturbing the mobile called party.
Further approaches have been taken by network innovations to alert the user to turn off their mobile terminal if the user is in an area where silence is desired (U.S. Pat. No. 6,085,096 to Nakamura et al). It is also possible to turn off or silence a mobile terminal by changing the mobile terminal operation mode utilizing the base station that the mobile terminal resides in (U.S. Pat. No. 6,342,212 to Weber et al, U.S. Pat. No. 5,996,655).
The network solutions of turning off the mobile terminal do not allow for emergency calls to reach the called party. On the other hand, if mobile terminal devices' ring tones were turned into silence or vibration (US Patent No. 2001/0031631 A1 to Pitts et al), the called party would be able to receive urgent calls but would also be disturbed by non-urgent calls. For instance, the proposal of Pitts et al. to send several standard messages to the calling party (such as “The party you are calling is in a secure area, please call back later.” or “The party you are calling is in a secure area.” or “The party you are calling can listen only.”) would still lead to distraction of the called party if the call were non-urgent.
Innovative solutions have been used to locate a mobile communication device and to alert a mobile party that he or she is being positioned (U.S. Pat. No. 6,311,069 to Havinis et al). The use of GPS information and a database to provide silence-desired areas have been proposed by Anderson et al (U.S. Pat. No. 6,230,017), Valentine et al (U.S. Pat. No. 6,011,973) and Alperovich et al (U.S. Pat. No. 6,233,448). Anderson et al propose hard and soft cells where communication with a mobile station can take place. If an urgent call is placed to a mobile station in a hard cell, the call will not go through. Valentine et al propose that transmission is restricted in certain cells but reception is enabled. Alperovich et al propose automatic feature activation (such as call forwarding) based on positioning, i.e., GPS. In all the systems using GPS described thus far, either 1) the mobile phone is shut off, silenced or forwarded, and the called party consequently misses urgent calls or 2) the call is placed and the called party may be disturbed by non-urgent calls.
Innovative solutions have been used to avoid distraction of the called party by Short Message Service (SMS) messages in a cellular telephone network described by Alperovich et al (U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,393). A screening application resident on a Home Location Register (the HLR) determines the identity of the entity associated with any request for short message routing information and causes the short message to be delivered or deleted according to the input provided by the called party. Essentially, a version of call rejection based on Caller ID for SMS messages is based on the identity of the entity associated with the request. Some urgent messages may be deleted or rejected based on the identity of the short message sender but other messages may still disturb the called party, who has to respond to non-urgent SMS messages.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a means for a called party to inform the calling party that the called party is in a “do not disturb” environment. It is a further object of the present invention to provide means for a calling party to make a decision to forward a call or SMS message to the called party, based on urgency and importance of the call.
While a mobile phone subscriber can be contacted at virtually any given time, there are conditions where a mobile phone subscriber may not want to be disturbed. The mobile phone alerting the called party might cause distraction and safety issues such as 1) while the called party is driving, and 2) when the called party is in an area where the called party is not allowed to receive a call (such as in a library or theatre). A first distraction occurs when a mobile phone alerts the called party of an incoming call. The distraction is further aggravated when the called party answers the call. Even if the called party originally decides not to answer the call, the called party may later be persuaded to find out the nature of the call once Caller ID is displayed or a voice mail notification page is received.
However, if the called party decides to answer the call, it might lead to further distraction of the called party. “Scientists at the University of Utah found that carrying out a telephone conversation while driving resulted in motorists driving less carefully than normal. The research found that using a mobile phone was more distracting than listening to music or a book on tape. This was the case even if the driver was using a hand-free mobile set—suggesting that the distraction is caused by a driver having to concentrate on the phone conversation” (ZD Net UK, “Safety fears over mobile use by car drivers”, Graeme Wearden, Friday 17 Aug. 2001).
Presently, to avoid receiving a call, a called party could utilize Caller ID capability, which would allow the called party to decide whether or not to answer a call. The called party might utilize call rejection function, which, based on a Caller ID number, would decide to reject communicating with the calling party. To achieve silence, the called party can turn off the phone, put it on vibration mode, on silence mode, or forward calls to its voice mail, answering machine or another phone number. The called party can further achieve silence by putting a calling party on hold until time is appropriate to answer the call.
There are problems with the current Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) network and messaging in providing silence to the called party. For example, current applications leave the decision of whether to disturb the called party totally in hands of the called party. Regardless of whether a call or message is urgent or not, the calling party is going to disturb the called party.
Presently, utilizing all the above-mentioned options provided by the GSM network, a called party cannot intelligently distinguish urgent calls from non-urgent calls. This increases the distraction risk while the called party is driving an automobile, causes a disturbance if the called party is in a meeting, and disturbs others if the called party is in a silence-desired area, such as a library or restaurant. If the called party decides to ignore the urgent incoming call, the call will be forwarded to a voice mail system or be abandoned by the calling party. This could be undesirable, as the calling party might have placed an emergency or other important call to the called party. If the calling party decides to leave a message for the called party, the called party might be further disturbed by a message page notification directed by the HLR. Additionally, the curiosity of who left the message or what the message contains might further distract the called party. Finally, the called party may try to retrieve the voice mail or non-urgent call left by the calling party, furthering the disturbance.
Currently, the called party could utilize the GSM network the HLR base Caller ID capability, which would allow the called party to decide to reject an SMS text based message i.e.: not Caller ID page, not voice mail-received page and not callback number page. Also, to achieve silence, the called party can turn off the phone or put it on vibration. The called party can further achieve silence by directing the mobile station (MS) to put received SMS text based message i.e.: not Caller ID page, not voice mail-received page and not callback number page messages in its memory to read later on. Utilizing the above-mentioned options provided by the GSM network, a called party couldn't distinguish urgent SMS messages from the non-urgent messages, thus increasing the distraction risk for non-urgent messages.
It is therefore an object of the current invention to provide a way for a called party to let a calling party know that the called party is in an area where silence is desired. The present invention would also provide the means for the calling party to forward the call or message to the called party at the discretion of the calling party, based on the urgency or importance of a call or message. The present invention further provides the means to store the Caller ID pages, voice mail pages and other SMS messages of non-urgent calls in a database at a SMS Service Center (SMS/SC), an external buffer or other storage site. The SMS/SC is then directed by the HLR to transmit the stored SMS messages to the called party once the called party is out of any silence-desired area.
It is important to note that, although the present invention provides the means by which the calling party can request the GSM network to put an urgent call or message through to the called party, there are still options left in the hands of the called party. These include the options to answer or not to answer, to read or not to read an SMS message, to put on hold or forward a call or message, to reject a call or message or to forward a message to voice mail. In essence, what the calling party may find urgent may not be found urgent by the called party, and the called party deals with the call appropriately with minimal disturbance.